Tag Archives: courgette

Friday 8th April 2011 – This hot weather …

is still going on relentlessly and I’m now a deep shade of red. Working outside is clearly good for me. But it didn’t reach the 42°C that it said it did on the temperature sender outside. And after a few minutes pondering this, I suddenly realised the answer to that.

Yes, I’ve had a great big bonfire (rather too close to the exterior temperature sender) and burned tons of stuff that was lying around doing no good. Including all of the foam-rubber seat cushions out of the old caravan that the rats trashed while I was ill.

And I’ll tell you what – I’ve never seen anything catch fire so quickly and easily and burn so fiercely. It’s put me right off caravans. If someone were to drop a fag-end down the bed there would be no survivors.

As you can guess, the tidying-up has started and I’ve been clearing things up. Not much because I’m no good at tidying up and I don’t know how to do it anyway. But at least there’s a little more space now that a lot of stuff has gone up in smoke. And there will be more to follow it as I slowly work my way round, although this isn’t the solution to my storage issues of course. The aim quite simply is to try to make the place a little more presentable in case I have visitors this year.

As well as that, I’ve been in the garden again and I’ve planted the pea and courgette seeds that I had set to soak a couple of days ago.As well as that, I stuck in half a dozen sweetcorn seeds. They are out of date and did nothing last year, but I’m intrigued to see if anything might happen.

In other news, I had a nice hot shower this evening and I did the washing-up with water from the home-made immersion heater, with a temperature of 68°C. It’s quite impressive, this immersion heater and the insulation.

-1

Thursday 25th November 2010 – WINTER HAS FINALLY ARRIVED

There was no snow when I woke up this morning, but it wasn’t half flaming cold.

So after breakfast I piddled off outside and dug up all my onions. There’s maybe about 50 of them and that’s not really enough for a year’s worth of cooking. I should have planted many more than that.

But with the temperature continuing to drop and with the heavy torrential rain that started to fall I called it a day in the garden and started to unpack the supplies that had come from the States and the supplies that Terry and Liz had bought me from the UK.

heavy snow les guis virlet puy de dome franceAnd while I was doing that, the heavy rain turned to heavy snow and that was that. It snowed and snowed and snowed and now we have had quite a pasting. It’s sub-zero outside and this snow is going to stick.

I went round to Rob and Nicolette’s too to thank them for keeping an eye on the premises. Nicolette said that she had had some of my beans and courgettes – one of which weighed 4.5 kilos! Courgettes grow well round here.

She had made a huge courgette and bean soup and had frozen some of it for my return which I thought was really nice of her. And in exchange I gave them a little something that I had bought in Canada and which was in the box of goodies.

Funnily enough, I went there at 18:00 for a quick chat and it was 20:45 when I left yet it only seemed like 5 minutes that I was there.

And now I’m holed up here in my room with a raging blaze from the little fire. The temperature was 7.4 degrees when I came up here but a good blaze for an hour or so brought the temperature up to 18 degrees, which is much more like it.

And I have no intention whatever of moving from here.

-3

Tuesday 24th August 2010 – Just look at the size of this!

monster courgette les guis virlet puy de dome franceNever mind the Winter of our Discount Tents, this is the Summer of the Monster Courgettes. This one has burst into life from being a cigar-shaped nonentity, is just a few days. Now it’s 44cms. I’ve got a luvverly bunch of coconuts indeed.

It’s so big that I only cooked half of it tonight, and with the spinach (out of the garden), carrots (ditto), beans (ditto) and chili (ditto) together with sone onions, lentils and garlic I made a huge mega-curry and there is enough to last for three days.

As well as the other half-courgette of course, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with that.

The pan was full to overflowing but as most of the courgette is nothing but water it soon simmers down to a reasonably size. And it was absolutely delicious.

Mind you, I’ll be eating courgettes until they come out of my ears. It’s the one thing that seems to do well here.

It was raining when I woke up and so after I let Terry and Simon into Lieneke’s house I carried on here – but not outside. The composting toilet will have to wait.

wardrobe back wall bedroom les guis virlet puy de dome franceWhat I did instead was to carry on working in the bedroom – the first time for about three months I reckon. And I now have the back wall finished as well as one of the sides of the fitted wardrobe that I’m building. That’s what is going down the far side just there.

I can’t do the other side of the wardrobe as it’s out of there that the electric wiring is coming and I need to work out how I’m going to fit it. But it’s nice to see progress all the same.

The weather brightened up this afternoon and so I reckoned on a shower, but the temperature has plummeted. 19°C it was outside, and the water temp was only 31°C. But not to worry – I tipped a kettle-full of boiling water into the solar tank. That took the temperature up to … errr ….45°C so a half-kettle of cold water took it back down to 42°C and that was my shower sorted. Delicious! Mind you,  won’t have to boil up water much longer as Simon gave me the boiler out of his van. It’s only 2.5 litres by the way but it will go nicely in the garage running off the excess charge over there. I’ve made a note of the maker and I’m going to see if they can do me a 50-litre one. That would be progress.

But the temperature is still falling, and with a clear sky, full moon and no clouds at all, it seems that the weather has turned (already!) and autumn is just around the corner. That’s depressing.

-3

Monday 16th August 2010 – We start off today …

roofing inside lean-to lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome france… with a couple of photos that features the inside of the roof, by way of a change.

Don’t mind the loose lath that is on top of the wall just there – we will be moving that in due course. But the rest of it looks pretty impressive.

You’ll also notice the black damp-proof membrane up there. That’s to stop the snow drifting in underneath the tiles and falling inside, something that’s a real problem around here in winter.

roofing inside lean-to lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome franceYou can see that we have extended the walls by mounting breeze blocks all the way up and we’ve put chevrons on there.

You will also notice the cross-beam that we fitted to the wall of the house the other day. The chevrons are supported on that. The cross-beam goes all the way across the wall of the house and it’s a good job that there were three of us to lift it as I remember it being flaming heavy.

roofing tiles lean-to lieneke les guis virlet puy de dome franceFrom the outside, however, it looks even more impressive. We had quite a few tiles left over from when we did the roof of the house and so we nailed the laths to the chevrons and popped the tiles onto the roof of the lean-to.

We didn’t have quite enough as you can see if you look at the top left-hand corner, and so we’ll have to go and pick up some more tomorrow. But we aren’t ‘arf cracking on with the job and we can be proud of this.

So my day has been spent in non-stop cement mixing – load after load after load, with a slight break to go to the quarry for more sand. So I’ve mixed a ton and a half of sand since the other day. No wonder I’m exhausted.

And so when we knocked off I went round the garden, weeded the carrot patch, pulled up some carrots, beans, spinach and a courgette, and sowed some lettuce and parsnips.

After crashing out I made tea – lentil courgette and split pea curry, with carrots spinach and beans. All followed by fresh strawberries. And it was gorgeous.

-1

Thursday 29th July 2010 – Today was exciting.

courgette strawberry les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis evening I picked the first courgette out of the garden and made myself a delicious courgette and lentil curry. It was magnificent, and furthermore there’s enough left over – and stored in the fridge – for 2 more days

I also went in search of strawberries as there were quite a few when I last looked, but it seems that mildew has done for most of those and there were only two left. And they were delicious too.

roofing edging tiles les guis virlet puy de dome franceThis morning we were back on the roof. One side is finished, complete with edging tiles all in place and properly cemented in.

We did however have a problem – the roofing tiles are 40cm so I dunno what possessed someone to buy 43cm edging tiles. Because of that, they don’t fit properly!

Still, we managed to get them to look very nice by using an aluminium straight-edge and an angle-grinder but it would have looked nicer with 40cm edgings.

kwikstage scaffolding les guis virlet puy de dome franceNow that we’ve done all of that, this afternoon we took down the scaffolding and put it up around the other side of the house. But that is on a slope and, like the Irish expedition to climb Mount Everest, we ran out of scaffolding.

We’ll have to finish off the other side of the edging tomorrow, and then re-position all of this scaffolding and then start to strip the roof.

roof collapsed lean to les guis virlet puy de dome franceAfter Terry left I went home and did something else that I was meaning to do for quite a while – years in fact. Keen readers of these outpourings in one of their many previous forms (it was after the Xoom blog but before the Yahoo one – might have been the Bravenet one) will remember that back in 2002 I was repairing a collapsed outbuilding when I collapsed, and it was never finished. But that is where the composting toilet is and where the washroom will be and I’m fed up of being rained upon. I can’t refit the roof just yet but I can put in the floor at the first floor level so I made a start on that. At least I won’t get p155ed on now when I’m riding the porcelain horse.

But, quite strangely, I’ve been hearing some bizarre noises in the verandah just recently and as I was coming back from this roof I heard a similar noise coming from the barn. I stuck my head inside just in time to see a flaming huge hedgehog drag a plastic bag full of wire rope off into one of the deepest and darkest recesses.

What is all that about?

The amount of stuff that I can’t find in that barn that I know full well is there – there’s probably a group of hedgehogs about to open a hardware store somewhere in the vicinity. I bet they will be doing deliveries too – using a SatNav that they will have acquired from somewhere.

-3

Sunday 26th July 2009 – TOMORROW THE WORLD!

courgette plant going berserk les guis virlet puy de dome franceI went into the greenhouse this evening to water the plants and this was what met me. Not a triffyd but a courgette plant making a desperate bid for freedom. It’s taken over all of the greenhouse and it’s heading for the door. This time next week it will have engulfed Claude’s house and by the end of the season it will have made it to Montlucon, judging by its present rate of growth.

My day of idleness got off to a good start at 07:45 when the alarm went off. I forgot to turn it off last night. Ahh well.

But I didn’t get up straight away and when I did come to my senses (not that this happens very often) I stayed in bed to do a lot of planning. It was 11:00 when I finally crawled out into daylight.

And as for my day of idleness, I spent it in a marathon tidying-up session. You can now walk round the garage where the Ebro is, the water room and the barn/workshop. I shifted tons of stuff and sorted out a whole lot more.

We’ll be able to find many more things this week when our adventures on the roof restart tomorrow morning.

-3